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Re-mapping Culture through Literature: Narratives as Vehicles of Culture
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authors, which shapes their texts. In these stories, the Gangā, the Narmadā and the Himālayās are the bearers of the culture, witness to a historical reality and the repository of ancient wisdom. The novels show the authors' cultural efforts to restore the community and repossess the culture. Both Joshi and Mehta uphold the cultural dynamism of traditional thought and hold a mirror to the destructive trends in power politics and consumerism-oriented greed. The fictional narratives, by re-creating an indigenous culture displace the historical discourse and help us read into the text, the mythological, archetypal, metaphysical and religious perception in the native literature.
Arun Joshi's The Last Labyrinth was published in 1981. A Sāhitya Akademi award winning work, this novel recounts the story of a modern Indian torn between the inner and the outer forces, the instinctive cultural leaning of the inner self and the rational, scientific yet consumer orientation of a Westernized Indian. The shares of Aftab's Company that Som Bhaskar desperately wants to grab are in the possession of Krishna in a temple on the Himalayas. Som's greed makes him undertake the difficult journey up the mountain, through the formidable crags and valleys, the glaciers and the frozen lakes; he dreads it, it is nightmarish but he is fascinated by it, all the same. As the author describes the mission one realizes that the Himālayās and Lord Krishna assume significance as cultural symbols. Som broods with a kind of cultural pride and admits unabashedly, "No, there is nothing simple about Krishna. Had it been so, He would not have survived ten thousand years. He would have died long ago with the gods of the Pharaohs, the Sumerians, Incās. Krishna was about as simple as the labyrinth of Aftab's Haveli". Som's journey through the Himālayās is reminiscent of the last climb of the Pandavas commonly known as Swargā-rohan; only, Som lacks attitudinal change; he tosses between an urge for self-understanding and the inability to forget his recent past and consequently his journey becomes one of nightmares, unfulfilled desires and failure. For a brief while, Som gets a kind of illumination, a short spell of peak experience that could have transformed him into a self-realized man, but as he admits, "This little flame of mine... yielded nothing beyond an ounce of tranquility". Throughout the climb we are not allowed to forget that it is the Himālayās the protagonist is climbing up on. Symbolically, his companions are Doctor K. and a friend called Väsudeva. K. could be read as an abbreviation for Krishna while Vāsudeva is one of the many names of Lord Krishna. Thus the journey assumes obvious cultural overtones. The author juxtaposes the puniness of man with the vastness of the unfathomable. The entire fabric of the narrative is dominated by the author's efforts to re-claim the culture and the inability to revert to the past.
In his last novel The City and the River, published in 1990 Arun Joshi deals with the existential angst of the entire culture. It is a muffled portrayal of post-independence India, a kind of allegorical picture, where intrigues, nepotism, ostracism and violence are rampant. The regime of the Grand Master in a particular city is full of fawning sycophants, self-seeking ruling classes and the helpless, hapless masses. The scenario, in fact, draws parallel between the Emergency in India and the oppressive regime of the Grand Master. The city becomes the victim of the greed of the purblind rulers and is destroyed by the angry river. The 'City' is unnamed and so is the 'River' but both gain multidimensional meanings when read in the national and cultural context. The narrative pattern of story within a story told by an old, wise teacher to his keen disciple follows the typical Indian narrational technique of Kathā. In the Indian narrative tradition a sutradhār or the main narrator recounts a story with the help of which the story (or the novel in the present case) advances. Often the framed stories are variations of some broad human behaviour. Panchtantra, Kādambari, Kathā Sarit Sägar, and
